COMPARATIVE DRAMA最新文献

{"title":"In Memoriam: Clifford O. Davidson: 1932–2024","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/cdr.2024.a936316","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cdr.2024.a936316","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> In Memoriam<span>Clifford O. Davidson: 1932–2024</span> <!-- /html_title --></li> </ul> <br/> Click for larger view<br/> View full resolution <p>In Memoriam</p> <p>Clifford O. Davidson</p> <p>(1932–2024)</p> <p></p> <p><strong>W</strong>hen Clifford Davidson retired from Western Michigan University in 2003, the Medieval Institute, where he held a joint appointment with English for nearly 40 years, printed a short volume of essays in his honor. If you read the introduction penned by Barbara Palmer, you learn about a person who was a prolific scholar, a persuasive editor, an intellectual trailblazer, and an energetic cheerleader. In retirement, Davidson remained close to the many institutions at the University that he played a leadership role in founding and nurturing, including this journal, still housed within the Department of English. Moreover, he left a global network of scholars who form, in part, his generous legacy of editorial and field leadership.</p> <p>Born October 29, 1932, Clifford Davidson attended one-room rural elementary schools near Faribault, Minnesota and later Brainerd (Minnesota) High School. He received his bachelor’s degree from St. Cloud State University and pursued graduate studies at the University of Minnesota, with interruptions during which he taught at the secondary <strong>[End Page 280]</strong> level and served in the U.S. Army, the latter as a post newspaper editor at the Granite City (Illinois) Engineer Depot. He moved to Michigan in 1959 to complete his graduate studies at Wayne State University, from which he received his Ph.D. and where he also was employed as an Instructor in English.</p> <p>Davidson received an appointment as Assistant Professor of English at Western Michigan University in 1965, and two years later helped to establish this journal, which he served as a co-editor for 32 years. As an active participant in the development of the Medieval Institute at the University, he saw it grow into an internationally recognized unit which would in time sponsor the largest annual medieval conference in the world. In 1976 he founded the Early Drama, Art, and Music research project and book series within the Medieval Institute and served as its director for a quarter of a century. He also assisted his wife, the musicologist and gifted soprano Audrey Ekdahl Davidson, as dramatic director of numerous medieval music-dramas presented by the Society for Old Music (now Early Music Michigan), of which she was the founder and director.</p> <p>His research, conducted in American and European libraries and archives, led to voluminous publications and an international reputation with his articles and reviews published on four continents. He was the author, co-author, editor, or co-editor of more than forty books and monographs, among them such titles as <em>From Creation to Doom: The York Cycle of M","PeriodicalId":39600,"journal":{"name":"COMPARATIVE DRAMA","volume":"45 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-09-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142142556","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Rewriting Idolatry: Doctor Faustus and Romeo and Juliet","authors":"Tom Rutter","doi":"10.1353/cdr.2024.a936319","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cdr.2024.a936319","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> Rewriting Idolatry: <span>Doctor Faustus and Romeo and Juliet</span> <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Tom Rutter (bio) </li> </ul> <blockquote> <p>FAUSTUS Her lips sucks forth my soul. See where it flies!</p> <p>Come, Helen, come, give me my soul again.</p> Marlowe, <em>Doctor Faustus</em> </blockquote> <blockquote> <p>ROMEO Sin from my lips? O trespass sweetly urged!</p> <p>Give me my sin again.</p> Shakespeare, <em>Romeo and Juliet</em> <sup>1</sup> </blockquote> <p><strong>T</strong>he lines quoted above accompany what may be the two most famous kisses in Elizabethan drama: the one between Doctor Faustus and Helen of Troy in the penultimate scene of Marlowe’s play, just before the harrowing depiction of Faustus’s final terror in the face of damnation, and the one that occurs towards the end of act one of <em>Romeo and Juliet</em> during the first meeting of the lovers. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say “the four most famous kisses,” since both of these speeches are delivered in between an initial kiss, which Faustus says sucks forth his soul and by which Romeo says his “sin is purged” (1.5.106), and a second that is imagined as restoring what has been taken away. The follow-up kisses are preceded by two very similar phrases: “Give me my soul again” from Faustus, “Give me my sin again” from Romeo. The combination of verbal and structural similarity is so striking as to suggest direct influence, all the more so given that in this scene Shakespeare departs from his principal source, <em>The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet</em> by Arthur Brooke. In the equivalent episode in Brooke’s poem, the lovers’ eye-beams are “ymingled,” and they hold hands and offer expressions of devotion, but no actual kiss takes place: what seems to the modern reader or theatregoer an inevitable and inextricable part of their first meeting appears only when the story transfers to the stage. <sup>2</sup> <strong>[End Page 341]</strong></p> <p>Some critics have noted the similarity between these two episodes. In his 2016 handbook <em>Doctor Faustus</em>, James N. Loehlin notes that “the line ‘give me my soul again’ . . . seems to have been remembered by Shakespeare in writing the first meeting of Romeo and Juliet,” while in a 2011 article on Shakespeare’s use of chiasmus Matthew Ramirez suggests that Faustus’s speech offered “some terms [that] Shakespeare later borrowed and reconfigured for a rather different dramatic situation.” <sup>3</sup> However, it is generally passed over in more substantial critical discussions of Marlowe’s influence on Shakespeare (surveyed later in this essay), while the editors of the Arden Second Series, Arden Third Series, Oxford World’s Classics and New Cambridge editions of <em>Romeo and Juliet</em>, who highlight numerous Marlovian parallels, omit this one. <sup>4</sup> It may be significant that both Loe","PeriodicalId":39600,"journal":{"name":"COMPARATIVE DRAMA","volume":"30 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-09-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142142558","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Drama of Serial Conversion in Early Modern England by Holly Crawford Pickett (review)","authors":"Arthur F. Marotti","doi":"10.1353/cdr.2024.a936321","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cdr.2024.a936321","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>The Drama of Serial Conversion in Early Modern England</em> by Holly Crawford Pickett <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Arthur F. Marotti (bio) </li> </ul> Holly Crawford Pickett. <em>The Drama of Serial Conversion in Early Modern England</em>. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2024. Pp. x + 264 + 8 b/w illus. $65.00 hardcover, $65.00 eBook. <p>This study departs from the usual explanations of serial conversions as acts of opportunism, unreliable products of emotional experiences, or problematic public gestures meant to convince both authorities and general audiences of their authenticity. The author announces the aims of her study at the start: “I use the triad of conversion, theatricality, and natural philosophy to argue that multiple converts challenge and even change the scholarly view of early modern spirituality and do so in several critical ways” (17).</p> <p>Chapter 1 deals with the serial convert Anthony Tyrrell, who used the literary forms to which other converts resorted to convince others of the sincerity of their religious change: the “motives” tract, the recantation sermon, and autobiographical account. The problem is that, although Tyrrell insisted on his own sincerity, he was viewed as a hypocrite. His most dramatic moment was when, in supposedly delivering a sermon recanting his Catholic beliefs, he attacked the established church and, when dragged from the pulpit, scattered copies of his sermon, which found its way into print. John Nichols, another serial convert, converted to Catholicism in 1577, but on his return from Rome was imprisoned before renouncing his Catholicism, serving the English government as an informer. The religiously indeterminate play, Nathaniel Woodes’s <em>The Conflict of Conscience</em>, based on the life of Francis Spiera, who renounced his Protestantism under papal pressure, “questions whether reconversion after apostacy is even possible” (42). It has two endings: in the first “the protagonist dies unrepentant” (45) and is a reprobate; in the second he becomes a triple convert. This play, Pickett suggests, “might have unsettled both authorities and readers alike” (50).</p> <p>Chapter 2 concentrates on William Alabaster, the Protestant and Catholic uses of the example of St. Augustine, and the “motives” genre. Alabaster, the author claims, “reserves a place for the theatrical as well as the polemical, within the devotional” (52). She claims that both Augustine’s <em>Confessions</em> and Alabaster’s <em>Conversion</em> “narrate the act of reading in an uncommonly dramatic fashion, one that suggests an intimate connection among reading, performance, and conversion” (54). Like Augustine, who experienced a sudden conversion after reading an account of the life of St. Anthony, Alabaster had a surprising “flash of insight, the overwhelming sense ","PeriodicalId":39600,"journal":{"name":"COMPARATIVE DRAMA","volume":"45 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-09-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142142710","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Macbeth by William Shakespeare (review)","authors":"Christopher Crosbie","doi":"10.1353/cdr.2024.a936323","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cdr.2024.a936323","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Macbeth</em> by William Shakespeare <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Christopher Crosbie (bio) </li> </ul> <em>Macbeth</em>, by William Shakespeare, directed by Simon Godwin, The Shakespeare Company, Washington, D.C. (April 9 – May 5, 2024) <p>The penultimate figure in Jacques’ “seven ages of man” soliloquy brilliantly conveys the vulnerabilities of old age, presenting us with a person living in “a world too wide for his shrunk shank” (2.7.160-1). As the body weakens for this figure, the surrounding world seems larger and more unsettling, perhaps dangerous. This rhetorical move is spatial but the effect cinematic. We can almost feel the distortions happening within and around the isolated individual, exposed in a world where agency itself seems to diminish.</p> <p>It may seem unnatural to bring the forest of Arden marching toward Scotland, yet this dialectic of shrinking figures and a world of overwhelming scope informs so much of Simon Godwin’s compelling production of <em>Macbeth</em>, adapted by Emily Burns and starring Ralph Fiennes and Indira Varma at the Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington, DC. The production presents a world of immense, unstoppable violence, a place where tsunamis of human brutality relentlessly sweep across everything in their path; at the same time, it gives us, in the very best ways, a claustrophobic world where shattered individuals, more often than not, only serve to make matters worse. Rather than worrying whether Shakespeare offers us a national or personal tragedy, this <em>Macbeth</em> effectively marshals its interest in both the play’s broad scope and its sense of intimate collapse to yield a tale as much about fatigue and despair as about sound and fury.</p> <p>Performed in a warehouse away from the STC’s usual venue, Godwin’s <em>Macbeth</em> immediately announces its status as a different kind of theatrical event, immersive virtually from the outset. The warehouse’s outer section houses concessions, ad hoc restrooms, modest seating, and a curiously large sculpture of the letter “M,” a somewhat odd accent choice, but one that doesn’t quite detract from the general atmosphere. Mist descends from above, filtering through hanging lighting, which guides the audience past a curtained border into a cavernous space designed to look like a section of a city ravaged by war. Three trees, inexplicably preserved from the destruction, stand spaced apart, overlooking a scene of otherwise complete desolation. Here, the audience encounters a detailed wasteland strewn with rubble, the scorched remnants of civilization half buried throughout, as two paths snake their way toward the main theater space, not yet fully visible itself. Whether intentional or not, the artifacts still legible amid the rubble point their way toward the play that will follow. A <strong>[End Page 399","PeriodicalId":39600,"journal":{"name":"COMPARATIVE DRAMA","volume":"44 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-09-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142142567","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Theater, War, and Revolution in Eighteenth-Century France and Its Empire by Logan J. Connors (review)","authors":"Yann Robert","doi":"10.1353/cdr.2024.a936322","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cdr.2024.a936322","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Theater, War, and Revolution in Eighteenth-Century France and Its Empire</em> by Logan J. Connors <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Yann Robert (bio) </li> </ul> Logan J. Connors. <em>Theater, War, and Revolution in Eighteenth-Century France and Its Empire</em>. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2024. Pp. x + 255 + 9 b/w illus. $110.00 hardback, $110.00 eBook. <p>Logan J. Connors gives a telling title, “Total Theater for Total War,” to his monograph’s penultimate chapter, the culmination, in many ways, of the book’s narrative arc. Drawing from David Bell and others, Connors underscores the unprecedented attributes that made wars of the late eighteenth century “total,” from their global span to their reliance on mass conscription and all available national resources. Among these resources was a groundbreaking “total theater,” characterized by “documentary-based dramaturgy, technological innovations, onstage military formations and battles, dramatic characters and actors who were actual soldiers, patriotic song breaks, the use of various military practices and customs in drama, and more” (148). Such strategies of reenactment, liveliness, and intimacy were designed to foster a more intense, unmediated engagement of French spectators in the plays as in the war effort. Totality thus serves as a crucial throughline in Connors’s book (indeed, “total,” “totality,” and “totalizing” appear 99 times). One might argue that it also perfectly captures what makes it such a unique and rewarding read, a veritable “Total Book on Total Theater for Total War.” Total in the remarkable variety of its methodological approaches: literary close-reading, performance studies, cultural military history, gender studies, and architectural analysis, to name a few. And total as well in its topics of interest, so many that it is best to let Connors list them: “plays depicting soldiers, performances in navy theaters and in other military venues, policies to compel soldiers to attend the theater, repertories of public theaters in provincial and colonial cities with significant military populations, the evolving relationship between theatrical diplomacy and armed conflict in colonial and occupied zones, soldier-actors and soldier-writers, the role of both theater and the military as ‘civilizing’ and ‘urbanizing’ forces, dramatic depictions of gender roles in battle and on the home front, public performances of coloniality and military rule, and theater as a tool for teaching combat skills, nationalism, sexuality, xenophobia, and more” (3).</p> <p>Totality need not mean exhaustivity, however, and throughout his monograph Connors identifies topics and areas awaiting further studies. Far from a weakness, this strikes me as a strength, a reflection of the work’s seminal status. Indeed, Connors has accomplished the rare feat of un","PeriodicalId":39600,"journal":{"name":"COMPARATIVE DRAMA","volume":"48 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-09-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142142566","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"\"Simply Sitting in a Chair\": Questioning Representational Practice and Dramatic Convention in Marguerite Duras's L'Amante anglaise and The Viaducts of Seine-et-Oise","authors":"Shelley Orr","doi":"10.1353/cdr.2024.a936318","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cdr.2024.a936318","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> ”Simply Sitting in a Chair”: Questioning Representational Practice and Dramatic Convention in Marguerite Duras’s <em>L’Amante anglaise</em> and <em>The Viaducts of Seine-et-Oise</em> <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Shelley Orr (bio) </li> </ul> <blockquote> <p>One doesn’t know in life when things are there. They escape you . . . You want to know what it would take for it to be so. For me to be on stage saying nothing, <em>to let myself see</em>, without especially thinking about something. That’s right.</p> Marguerite Duras, <em>La Vie matérielle</em>, translated by Carol Barko (1987) </blockquote> <blockquote> <p>It is difficult to create a believable, sympathetic character while simply sitting in a chair answering questions for an hour, but Ms. Zabriskie pulls it off. As the actress stares off into space, wrings her hands in her lap, or clutches the hem of her skirt, <em>we see</em> the bleakness of Claire’s life as clearly as if she had been a neighbor.</p> Wilborn Hampton, review of Duras’s <em>English Mint/L’Amante Anglaise</em> (1988) </blockquote> <p><strong>F</strong>or both French novelist Marguerite Duras and American theatre critic Wilborn Hampton, the theatre is a place to see, an understanding in line with the Greek <em>théatron</em> (the seeing place, “a place for ‘looking at’ something”), from which the theatre takes its name. <sup>1</sup> However, what one sees in the theatre and how one sees it are quite different for writer and critic. Hampton expects to see characters and dramatic action in accordance with the conventions of mimetic realism and, in the case of the production of Duras’s 1968 work <em>L’Amante Anglaise</em> that he reviewed, <strong>[End Page 312]</strong> in accordance with the more specific conventions of the crime drama or <em>drame policier</em>. In her play, however, Duras questions the former and only appears to adhere to the latter as she challenges what is among the oldest of theatrical forms: the murder mystery. Ever since Sophocles’ <em>Oedipus Rex</em> laid a foundation for the genre (thanks in part to framing provided by Aristotle’s <em>Poetics</em>), with its cause-and-effect, linear plotline, in which each clue builds the emotional intensity until the climax reveals all, the murder mystery has been a favorite of playwrights and novelists. In her <em>L’Amante anglaise</em>, however, Duras mimics the form to question and undermine theatrical realism’s ability to engage in a project of uncovering the truth.</p> <p>We can get a sense of Duras’s project of mimicry, subversion, and critique in <em>L’Amante Anglaise</em>—as well as Hampton’s inability or unwillingness to understand it—in Hampton’s review of Stages Trilingual Theater’s English-language production of the play, which was performed in 1988 at New York’s Cherry Lane Theater under the title <em>English Mint/L’Amante anglaise<","PeriodicalId":39600,"journal":{"name":"COMPARATIVE DRAMA","volume":"22 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-09-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142142557","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Measuring Protagonism in Early Modern European Theatre: A Distant Reading of the Character of Sophonisba","authors":"David J. Amelang","doi":"10.1353/cdr.2024.a936320","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cdr.2024.a936320","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> Measuring Protagonism in Early Modern European Theatre: <span>A Distant Reading of the Character of Sophonisba</span> <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> David J. Amelang (bio) </li> </ul> <h2>Introduction</h2> <p><strong>A</strong>ny person taking their first steps into the wide and complex world of early modern comparative theatre history immediately confronts one basic fact: that during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Europe was divided into territories that allowed women to act professionally and territories that banned them from doing so. In the commercial theatres of Shakespeare’s England, most famously, adolescent boys were charged with performing all female roles, whereas at exactly the same time in countries such as Italy, France, and Spain actresses were considered the stars of their industries. This division was not sculpted in stone, with some nations wavering back and forth on how to handle what authorities broadly perceived as a choice between the lesser of two evils: having either women or young cross-dressed men commanding attention on the nation’s public stages. Needless to say, depending on which laws and customs were in effect, dramatists had to adapt and adjust the way they wrote plays to the realities—and limitations—of their cultures of performance. It stands to reason that it would have been quite different to create a role for a young boy who was just getting started in the business of playing than for an established celebrity actress who was broadly seen as the main attraction in the eyes of the theatregoing public. <strong>[End Page 367]</strong></p> <p>Unable to shake this thought, I quickly became fixated with trying to identify and trace the different factors that influenced the prominence of female roles in the plays of early modern Europe. Fall 2021 saw the online release of <em>Rolecall</em> (http://www.rolecall.eu), an open-access database which I developed as a way of charting the plays and characters of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century European theatre. Its original purpose was to encourage scholars and students of Renaissance and Baroque theatre comparatively to explore the constellations of characters in early modern Europe’s dramatic corpora, with a particular focus on their gender dynamics. Did the presence or absence of actresses in one or another country affect the type of female characters their dramatic traditions ended up featuring? Did plays written by female playwrights feature lengthier female roles than those of their male counterparts? Is there a considerable difference between the number of female leads in the plays written for the Globe-like amphitheatres of suburban London, in which all female playgoers had to be accompanied by a male chaperone, as opposed to the elite indoor playhouses of the City that allowed for more women in the audience? These are the initial ques","PeriodicalId":39600,"journal":{"name":"COMPARATIVE DRAMA","volume":"19 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-09-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142142563","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Keeping the Violence Out of Sight: Representing Systems of Oppression with Offstage Violence","authors":"Richard Gilbert","doi":"10.1353/cdr.2024.a920789","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cdr.2024.a920789","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> Keeping the Violence Out of Sight:<span>Representing Systems of Oppression with Offstage Violence</span> <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Richard Gilbert (bio) </li> </ul> <p>Sometimes what we don't see with our own eyes can hit harder than what we do, and for those who create theatre that challenges the potent imbedded systems of violence by which our society oppresses so many of its people, hitting hard is crucial. Contemporary theatremakers are often deeply interested in telling stories that thematize institutional or systemic violence. Many contemporary plays thematize the violent structures under which we live in an attempt to come to terms with them, while many older plays are re-imagined by directors and producers in ways that inject the theme of systemic violence where it might have been only latent in or even absent from the source text. In drama, it is hard to directly represent mass violence. Generally a play will focus on a few characters, some of whom will represent systems of oppression by enacting violence on others who represent the oppressed. When violence is represented mimetically on stage in this way, there is always the danger that the audience will receive it as specific violence against a specific character rather than as part of a broader societal issue.<sup>1</sup></p> <p>Anyone involved in public discourse, whether on social media or in the mainstream news, will be sadly familiar with the experience of trying to talk about a system but inevitably ending up in a discussion of the specific. All too often, for example, discussions of police violence get derailed by interlocutors treating every example as a singular event rather than as evidence of a systemic problem that needs solving. The problem is that focus on a specific incident obfuscates the systemic issue and can end up being misread as an argument that the problem itself is specific <strong>[End Page 131]</strong> rather than systemic. That is, no matter how many examples there are of police murder, some people will insist on referring to each as \"one bad apple.\" Representing systemic violence onstage through direct mimetic illusions of specific acts of violence (so, for example, showing a cop killing a person of color or a homophobe brutalizing a queer character) can generate a similar cognitive challenge for an audience because we are used to identifying with individual characters. The shock of violence can exacerbate the problem as it tends to increase our empathic response, making it harder for even a critically engaged audience to focus out to the systemic issues at play.</p> <p>Offstage violence can be a potent solution to the problem of representing systemic and institutional violence. I will argue that there are three primary qualities of offstage violence that make it so effective in this regard. The first is that there are metaphorical ","PeriodicalId":39600,"journal":{"name":"COMPARATIVE DRAMA","volume":"47 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-03-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140043724","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Institutionalized Violence and Oppression: Ambiguity, Complicity and Resistance in El Campo and The Conduct of Life","authors":"Araceli González Crespán","doi":"10.1353/cdr.2024.a920788","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cdr.2024.a920788","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> Institutionalized Violence and Oppression:<span>Ambiguity, Complicity and Resistance in <em>El Campo</em> and <em>The Conduct of Life</em></span> <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Araceli González Crespán (bio) </li> </ul> <p>Argentinian playwright Griselda Gambaro's <em>El Campo</em>, written in 1967 and first performed in 1968, is a play that portrays institutionalized violence through ambiguity, double meanings, duplicity, lies, and lack of reference.<sup>1</sup> Upon his arrival to what he presumes to be a new job as an accountant, the main character Martín will slowly realize that, instead, he is a prisoner in a concentration camp. What happens on stage and what the victims experience is never explicit, so both the protagonist and the audience are confronted with the visible, physical consequences of such violence combined with the psychological terror induced by lack of definition, vagueness, and ignorance. Oppression deprives the victims and the audience of any sense of comprehension and renders them powerless.</p> <p><em>The Conduct of Life</em> premiered almost twenty years later, in 1985. Cuban American Maria Irene Fornes set the scene in \"<em>A Latin American country. The present</em>.\"<sup>2</sup> The general, diffuse reference to place and time does not incorporate more specific details other than the performance space: the house of Orlando, an army lieutenant that will soon be a commander. He participates in tortures and abuse not only as part of his professional duties but also privately, at home, where he keeps Nena, a twelve-year-old destitute girl he has kidnapped. Here, the victimizer sadistically replicates the institutional abuse in the personal domain. Other characters in the household, namely his wife Leticia, are at first unaware of the existence of Nena although her complicity plays a role in the sustained abuse of the victim.</p> <p>The arrival of the new millennium seemed to bring with it the illusion that military regimes were a thing of the past and that democracy was the <strong>[End Page 109]</strong> destiny, if not reality, across America. In the continent, threats to political stability seemed to come from afar, with Islamic terrorism identified as the external enemy; however, in the second decade of the century, we have already witnessed the surge of anti-democratic reactions based on demagogy and populism from within the system. For example, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil or Donald Trump in the United States, both became presidents by virtue of democratic elections but have pushed the limits of what democracy means by questioning the voting process. Prior to the 2022 election, President Bolsonaro—who openly defended Brazil's military dictatorship—uttered constant baseless accusations of fraud in the electoral system, attacked freedom of speech, and repeatedly threatened the Supreme Court.<sup>3</sup","PeriodicalId":39600,"journal":{"name":"COMPARATIVE DRAMA","volume":"2 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-03-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140043797","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"\"Only Write the Good Parts\": Playwright Lucas Hnath in Conversation with Jay Malarcher","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/cdr.2024.a920784","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cdr.2024.a920784","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> \"Only Write the Good Parts\":<span>Playwright Lucas Hnath in Conversation with Jay Malarcher</span> <!-- /html_title --></li> </ul> <p><em>The keynote address at the 2023 Comparative Drama Conference was a conversation with playwright Lucas Hnath. His plays, known for their striking intellectual-tennis match-style dialogue, include</em> Death Tax <em>(2012)</em>, A Public Reading of an Unproduced Screenplay About the Death of Walt Disney <em>(2013)</em>, Red Speedo <em>(2013)</em>, Isaac's Eye <em>(2014)</em>, The Christians <em>(2015)</em>, Hillary and Clinton <em>(2016)</em>, Dana H. <em>(2019)</em>, The Thin Place <em>(2019), and, most famously</em>, A Doll's House, Part 2 <em>(2017), which received eight 2017 Tony Award nominations, including for Best Play. The recipient of awards that include a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Steinberg Playwright award, the Windham-Campbell Literary Prize, and the Obie Award for Playwriting for</em> The Christians, <em>Hnath teaches playwriting and is Head of Performance for the Dramatic Writing program at NYU. In this wide-ranging conversation with scholar Jay Malarcher (West Virginia University), Hnath shares his processes for generating ideas, researching, and teaching playwriting; the origins of several of his plays; and his use of ellipses as percussive beats</em>.</p> <p><em>Hnath was introduced by Comparative Drama Conference director William C. Boles (Rollins College)</em>.</p> William C. Boles: <p>In Lucas Hnath's note to actors and directors on the nature of the pacing of his play <em>Isaac's Eye</em>, he writes, \"keep it moving\"—and my aim is to follow this instruction with this introduction. Perhaps it's apt to begin by noting Lucas's meticulous attention to the way his lines should be delivered. In most of the editions of his plays you will find him urging his actors and directors not to dawdle with his language. In <em>Death Tax</em> he instructs to let the play move swiftly, and I'm really badly <strong>[End Page 9]</strong> paraphrasing this, but essentially, he wrote that if the play runs longer than eighty-five minutes, the director really screwed up.</p> <p>Perhaps this fascination with the continuous flowing nature of his characters' dialogue can be traced to a fascination from his childhood. Anyone here know what city Lucas went to school in? Orlando! What are we famous for? Disney amusement parks, right. Growing up, Lucas had a fascination with amusement park rides, and he wanted to design his own ride, and by becoming a playwright, he essentially has fulfilled this childhood goal. Eschewing intermissions, he locks the audience into the theatre, much like we are strapped into Space Mountain, or Tron, or one of those annoying Star Wars rides. And then, as he says about each of his plays, the thing doesn't stop until it stops.</p> <p>While his best-known play revisits Nora ","PeriodicalId":39600,"journal":{"name":"COMPARATIVE DRAMA","volume":"12 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-03-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140043844","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}